Step 2: Develop a Grand Strategy
We've gone over what we can recruit and what we have for magic paths. The next questions come to what to do? I look at the grand strategy decision from a broad perspective and I break it up into three game phases. In general, you can be good at two phases but rarely good at all three. How you manage that is key to winning.
Phase 1: Early game
Early game is expansion and early rushing. Let's go over expansion first. Most nations can do extremely well expanding with an awake pretender. But that always costs late game power. Can you expand without one? In real multi-player games a practical expansion is 15 or so provinces per player. Some folks shoot for 20+ but the reality is that can lead to an early death by a gang up. In graphs off games it's more viable but with graphs a huge nation is SUCH a target. I prefer to expand moderately and keep in the average size. I play for the win, not to be big fast. I need a caveat here. There is a great variation amongst Dominions communities in the ability to develop alliances to deal with a fast expanding opponent. This is a clear case where you need to grasp the culture of the community and the likelihood of being attacked by multiple opponents for being too threatening.
I am a somewhat careful player who does well in late game. But I have also been pushing myself to use more aggressive designs in the recent past. I am not advocating for any particular style in play just mentioning my own preference and habits.
Early expansion is very easy with heavy bless or an awake SC pretender. Without those you need some scripting skill. Practice fighting with the minimum troops required and you'll do just fine. Do you have powerful expansion troops?
What is the middle game? In my view it's the period of the game when magic becomes as powerful as troops. You can now leverage spells and summons to supplement your basic troops.
I consider mid game to begin when expansion is complete and diplomacy and maneuver starts up in a big way. It tends to be dominated by armies and/or thugs with some mage support but research needs are very critical so magi are quite busy. Do you have some solid middle game options? Things to look for are recruitable or summonable thugs you can gear cheaply. In Dominions 5, I try to limit thugs to a total cost of 15 gems. This is based on the concept that a thug has a specific purpose. I define 3 of them: take light to moderate province defence, killing other thugs, or army support. Each purpose tends to need different equipment or buff spells.
It's also when you MUST site search in earnest. Due to the distribution of sites, manual search with magi with duel or triple paths is by far the most efficient. Analysis has shown that about 90% of all sites are level 1 or 2. This means that the most efficient searchers are multiple path magi at level 2. And some additional paths at level 1 never hurt. I use site searching spells to fill gaps in manual coverage or for paths you get later by a lucky independent mage or a summon. This guide may help: Magic Sites and Searching
So the needs of gems, armies, thugs and research will heavily impact your pretender design. Can you leverage your national power and still not leave any glaring gaps in your options? Will you have a way to eat a neighbour? It's the time of the game to look at weaker neighbours and plan to be in the winning group. Games usually narrow down to the 3-4 real competitors for the win by now.
Many nations can start to convert from purchased armies to summoned armies. This is a time to look carefully at the cost/benefit of summons. There are some VERY efficient summons which hold up well late game and there are a lot of inefficient summons. However, some of the inefficient summons have niche use such as shoring up a defence in the early game during a rush. It's beyond the scope of this guide to go into detail on the efficiency of summons but take note of the many summon spells that scale with magic level. If you take a high bless pretender (therefore high magic), many of these summons are incredibly efficient.
With wide magic path access but fairly low maximum paths, the magi of Erytheia will be able to cast a broad selection of defensive and offensive combat spells. With wide magic paths, but only a lucky random to get some level 3 higher paths, I expect that summoning quality troops will be a challenge. Forging magic path boosters will also become important for summoning as well as battle magic. So reviewing again the magic available, I can see some key mid game research. Alteration to about level 5 provides a lot of value in fire, earth, water and astral buffing spells. Conjuration of at least 3 provides the magic path boost spells summon earth and phoenix power. Evocation combined with the path boost spells make a number of options for fire, earth and water at research 4 to 6.
You can see that a number of these require path level 3 which is rare and suggests forging boosters. Some also require paths not available on the national magi. I am leaning towards using the pretender to get these paths. A rainbow or titan pretender with broad magic and some bless is looking like a great solution.
Early expansion is very easy with heavy bless or an awake SC pretender. Without those you need some scripting skill. Practice fighting with the minimum troops required and you'll do just fine. Do you have powerful expansion troops?
LA Erytheia Example:
My game with Erytheia is now on turn 13 as I write this section. I fumbled the first five turns quite badly but not clearly grasping the oddities of Erytheia troops on land. The slow combat move of the heavy infantry and sacred infantry makes scripting a challenge. However, they do work to expand with minimal bless. Preparing a test game or two and practicing expansion with different pretender designs is a useful tool for important games. I usually do that for large turn a day type games but not for blitz games played in a single day. I cut my testing short this time.
What I found worked was a small number of the sacred Setting Sun with the slow Hoplites to soak crossbows and draw aggression. Then flanking with squads of the faster Phalangites and Thyreophorite javelins.
The nation has potential to do key research rush quickly to help defend against an early human opponent so a focus on Alteration magic to level 4 for body ethereal and other low level buff spells for troops is a valid approach as well. This again supports a light bless and saving pretender points for scales or research potential.
Phase 2: Middle Game
What is the middle game? In my view it's the period of the game when magic becomes as powerful as troops. You can now leverage spells and summons to supplement your basic troops.
I consider mid game to begin when expansion is complete and diplomacy and maneuver starts up in a big way. It tends to be dominated by armies and/or thugs with some mage support but research needs are very critical so magi are quite busy. Do you have some solid middle game options? Things to look for are recruitable or summonable thugs you can gear cheaply. In Dominions 5, I try to limit thugs to a total cost of 15 gems. This is based on the concept that a thug has a specific purpose. I define 3 of them: take light to moderate province defence, killing other thugs, or army support. Each purpose tends to need different equipment or buff spells.
It's also when you MUST site search in earnest. Due to the distribution of sites, manual search with magi with duel or triple paths is by far the most efficient. Analysis has shown that about 90% of all sites are level 1 or 2. This means that the most efficient searchers are multiple path magi at level 2. And some additional paths at level 1 never hurt. I use site searching spells to fill gaps in manual coverage or for paths you get later by a lucky independent mage or a summon. This guide may help: Magic Sites and Searching
So the needs of gems, armies, thugs and research will heavily impact your pretender design. Can you leverage your national power and still not leave any glaring gaps in your options? Will you have a way to eat a neighbour? It's the time of the game to look at weaker neighbours and plan to be in the winning group. Games usually narrow down to the 3-4 real competitors for the win by now.
Many nations can start to convert from purchased armies to summoned armies. This is a time to look carefully at the cost/benefit of summons. There are some VERY efficient summons which hold up well late game and there are a lot of inefficient summons. However, some of the inefficient summons have niche use such as shoring up a defence in the early game during a rush. It's beyond the scope of this guide to go into detail on the efficiency of summons but take note of the many summon spells that scale with magic level. If you take a high bless pretender (therefore high magic), many of these summons are incredibly efficient.
LA Erytheia Example
And Erytheia has the option of communions. For effective communions key research are Conjuration 5 for Light of the Northern Star and Thaumaturgy 4+ for communion spells and astral attack spells.
In a quick review, there are not many great summons although the national spells for Erytheia deserve a close look. For those not sure, you can easily load the mod inspector, select Erytheia as the nation and click the toggle for nation spells only.
You can see that a number of these require path level 3 which is rare and suggests forging boosters. Some also require paths not available on the national magi. I am leaning towards using the pretender to get these paths. A rainbow or titan pretender with broad magic and some bless is looking like a great solution.
For forging boosters, many are available at Construction 4 and most of the rest at construction 6 making those another important goal for research planning in the mid game.
What is late game? This is the period of the game when research dominates.
Unless you are playing on very small maps with few players you will need a late game plan. Here are some classic late game plans.
1) Be massive huge and walk over everyone. This is the basis behind most major bless builds since they begin to stall out as late game approaches. If you aren't already the biggest and baddest economy you will find the high magic late game counters very painful. Huge swarms of tripled blessed jags are completely useless versus teleport master enslave.
2) Dominate the world with crazy piles of freespawn. The classics are EA and MA Pan, MA Asphodel, MA Scleria, LA Lemuria, EA R'lyeh and LA R'lyeh. But this method also requires serious magic buffing since freespawn chaff dies like flies without huge buffs. Your plan will require a hard push for the big army buffs: Will of the Fates, Army of Gold/Lead, Massed X, etc etc.
3) Roll out lethal squads of battle magi. Blood and astral come to mind as the tops for this option. Elemental magic is tougher to use due to large area effect resistance spells. I strongly recommend this plan includes a huge push for very broad diversity. It is also my favourite late game plan. I also like to add squads of elite troops and elite summons as both heavy meat in front of magi and for tactic specific methods such as storm flyers landing in the rear.
4) Thugs and SC's. I'm going to list this as a grand plan but personally it's deeply flawed. These should be included in any plan and need support. There is no such thing as an invulnerable SC. Too often I see folks going this route and forgetting to back up those 200 gem SC's. Along comes a custom counter and poof. All those gems are gone.
5) Put up game winning globals. The obvious culprits are Utterdark, Burden of Time, Arcane Nexus or Astral Corruption. However, these are suicide if you don't have the resources to hold off the inevitable attacks from everyone. On the other hand, if you don't plan to put these up pretty early, you will have a slim hope of doing so.
6) Put up lynch pin globals. TheDemon reminded me of this. It's not by itself a game winning strategy but it's very important. All of the gem generating globals fit here as well and very valuable globals like Gift of Health. These are not globals that force your opponents to team up to kill you and you can get great value. The important thing to consider is how you will cast them. Can you use national magi? Do you need some construction and boosters? Is this a job for your pretender? Even an odd spell like The Looming Hell can play here. It's a weak global but very cheap and a great deterrent to limit raiding.
6) A massive blood economy and sacrifice slaves for the dominion kill. This is only viable for a few nations but it's very effective when done right. I won't go into great detail on this option.
Phase 3: Late Game
What is late game? This is the period of the game when research dominates.
Unless you are playing on very small maps with few players you will need a late game plan. Here are some classic late game plans.
1) Be massive huge and walk over everyone. This is the basis behind most major bless builds since they begin to stall out as late game approaches. If you aren't already the biggest and baddest economy you will find the high magic late game counters very painful. Huge swarms of tripled blessed jags are completely useless versus teleport master enslave.
2) Dominate the world with crazy piles of freespawn. The classics are EA and MA Pan, MA Asphodel, MA Scleria, LA Lemuria, EA R'lyeh and LA R'lyeh. But this method also requires serious magic buffing since freespawn chaff dies like flies without huge buffs. Your plan will require a hard push for the big army buffs: Will of the Fates, Army of Gold/Lead, Massed X, etc etc.
3) Roll out lethal squads of battle magi. Blood and astral come to mind as the tops for this option. Elemental magic is tougher to use due to large area effect resistance spells. I strongly recommend this plan includes a huge push for very broad diversity. It is also my favourite late game plan. I also like to add squads of elite troops and elite summons as both heavy meat in front of magi and for tactic specific methods such as storm flyers landing in the rear.
4) Thugs and SC's. I'm going to list this as a grand plan but personally it's deeply flawed. These should be included in any plan and need support. There is no such thing as an invulnerable SC. Too often I see folks going this route and forgetting to back up those 200 gem SC's. Along comes a custom counter and poof. All those gems are gone.
5) Put up game winning globals. The obvious culprits are Utterdark, Burden of Time, Arcane Nexus or Astral Corruption. However, these are suicide if you don't have the resources to hold off the inevitable attacks from everyone. On the other hand, if you don't plan to put these up pretty early, you will have a slim hope of doing so.
6) Put up lynch pin globals. TheDemon reminded me of this. It's not by itself a game winning strategy but it's very important. All of the gem generating globals fit here as well and very valuable globals like Gift of Health. These are not globals that force your opponents to team up to kill you and you can get great value. The important thing to consider is how you will cast them. Can you use national magi? Do you need some construction and boosters? Is this a job for your pretender? Even an odd spell like The Looming Hell can play here. It's a weak global but very cheap and a great deterrent to limit raiding.
6) A massive blood economy and sacrifice slaves for the dominion kill. This is only viable for a few nations but it's very effective when done right. I won't go into great detail on this option.
LA Erytheia Example:
With the previous sections on specific troops, magi and research it looks like the best late game strategy is lethal squads of battle magic supporting troops and summons. With good access to communions and broad magic paths, Erytheia can cast almost all of the large battlefield wide spells and use powerful high level evocations and thaumaturgy to destroy armies.
As part of the late game plan, I intend to summon a number of diversity magi such as naiads, kokythiads and perhaps lamia queens to broaden the magic available. Most of those require a lot of gems and high level conjuration research. I expect gem income to be excellent compared to many other nations since you have a broad selection of magic at level 2 or higher. I was questioned about this statement since site frequency is lower in late age on default settings although I have seen that many administrators set the magic site higher at game start. But any magic site settings affect nations fairly equally and broader magic leads to more gem income.
With that huge variety in random magic it's hard to predict if global spells will be easily available. They tend to need path level 5 or more and a lot of gems so that will require either the pretender or summoned magi and boosters from forging. No globals stick out as obvious right now in the early planning.
I am leaning more heavily to a diversity pretender.
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